Thursday, June 28, 2007

GOURMET TOFU FROM YOUR OWN KITCHEN!

Last week I came across this very cool blog post (UPDATE June 2015: The blog doesn't exist anymore, unfortunately) about making homemade tofu with vegetables and herbs added. The authors called it "tofeta", but, since that name conjures up a salty, fermented taste for me, I just call it "gourmet tofu". Whatever you call it, it's a brilliant idea.

That article inspired me (as the authors intended) to think of other flavors, and quite a few combinations came to mind. However, I decided to try it more or less according to their directions for a start. They did not specify the amount of soymilk they started with, so I used 2 batches from my soymilk maker, which is 3 quarts, un-flavored. (PS, June 2015: the soymilk makers I have are Soyquick, but that brand is no longer in business-- too bad, they are great and have lasted a long time. You can check the reviews on amazon.com of other brands [or amazon.ca or the one for your country]).

NOTE: There are explicit directions for making tofu, written by my friend Brenda Wiley, at this link. Just follow those directions, with my additions below. If you don't want to make your own soymilk, and you have access to fresh unflavored soymilk from an Asian soy product store (most big cities have such a store), you can use that instead. But make sure it is fresh and un-flavored!

They added dried mushrooms, dried leeks, and dried sage to the soymilk before coagulating. Since I had some fresh leeks and beautiful sage growing in the garden, I decided to use those, plus some dried mixed wild mushrooms, which I soaked in some hot water. I also decided to chop the sage and leeks (green and white part) in the food processor and then sauté them briefly in a little olive oil, to bring out the flavors and chopped the drained, soaked mushrooms (the directions from the blog mentioned were a bit vague).

I used 1/2 cup of the hot mushroom soaking water instead of plain water to dissolve the coagulator (I used nigari). I added the prepared veggies and herbs to the hot soymilk when it got to just over 180 degrees F, then drizzled in the dissolved nigari, stirred gently and briefly, covered the pan and let set for 10 minutes.

I use a kind of jury-rigged pressing system. (Jury-rigged or Jerry-rigged? Jury-built or Jerry-built? Although their etymologies are obscure and their meanings overlap, these are two distinct expressions. Something poorly built is “jerry-built.” Something rigged up temporarily in a makeshift manner with materials at hand, often in an ingenious manner, is “jury-rigged.” “Jerry-built” always has a negative connotation, whereas one can be impressed by the cleverness of a jury-rigged solution. Many people cross-pollinate these two expressions and mistakenly say “jerry-rigged” or “jury-built.” See also http://www.word-detective.com/2012/01/jerry-rig-jury-rig/) :

I used 5/ 28 oz. cans of tomatoes and stacked the last 3 on a wooden cutting board placed over the first two cans to make the pressure even. That's about 9 lbs. and I pressed it for about 15 minutes. It's pretty firm tofu. It made 1 lb. 2 oz.

It is fantastic! I ate some fresh and warm, just drizzled with a little soy sauce, as the Japanese do.

UPDATE June 29, 2007:
Last night, as a starter, we had small pieces coated lightly with nutritional yeast flakes, pan-fried in just a little olive oil with a few drops dark sesame oil, and served with soy sauce. Divine!

This morning, I scrambled it with a good sprinkle each of nutritional yeast flakes and soy sauce to eat with toast. Lovely! (I apologize for not being very inventive-- it tastes so good in these simple preparations. I do want to try marinating, deep-frying, etc. at a later date.)

I did not store it in water (which is the way you would normally store fresh tofu), because I didn't want to destroy the flavor, and we plan to eat it up soon, anyway. I just placed it in the fridge on a plate, covered with plastic wrap.

14 comments:

What a wonderful idea! Looks great. I would love to own my own soy milk maker. It is on my wish list.

I just got the Everyday Dish DVD in the mail and the first recipe I made were your Vegan Chicken Cutlets. I just posted a review and pics! A big thank you to you, Dreena, and Julie for this very creative DVD! I hope everyone buys it. The DVD is great!

Exciting!!Fresh herbs and veggies would give a really different taste; your texture does not appear much different than ours. Using dried herbs I thought might really intensify the flavor of something that tends to be a bit water-logged -- I look forward to experimenting with dried tomatoes and fresh basil, etc. It will, of course, no longer be remotely Asian necessarily, but ... the quest for "something else" always continues!

In your Archives you had a recipe based on one in "Simply Heavenly", using soyflour and tomato juice as liquid and acidifier, without straining out the soymilk. A grainier end product, but it may fit some textures, save time and add fibre to the resulting tofu.

I think that you're probably getting a higher-fiber product than you think, if you're using your soy-milk maker. As I've seen in the results from my mother-in-law's Soy Toy, the Okara you're left with is quite fine, and you don't get much volume of it, either.

When we make it over at WishIWereBaking we use a blender, having soaked our soybeans overnight, but we still end up with quite a quantity of Okara when we're done.

It's kind of a shame, really, because we're usually only motivated to make tofu when we run out of Okara. It's such a wonderful thing to have on hand, dried, to use in breads.

A friend tried this recipe and wrote: "I threw the mushrooms right into the hot milk ..... I'd recommend not doing that. My first bite simply SCREAMED mushroom taste!! Too much." It might work with a smaller amount of mushrooms, however, infusing the soy curds with mushroom flavor, but not quite as much. I'm going to try it that way soon!

That soyflour recipe was baked, but what about using wet heat (steaming, pressure cooking, &c.)? And soy concentrates or isolates rather than soyflour? I had read that a pH 6.4 solution of isolate would form a gel after pressure cooking. This may be too out of scope for home cooking...I don't know anyone with litmus paper laying about.

It's not even that you'd need litmus paper, but that the pH would be thrown by the other ingredients you added, and some of the ingredients are in "chunks," so you'd not be able to test their pH effectively. That's part of the reason behind pressure canning things about which you are in doubt.

With ours, we threw the mushrooms straight in ... and didn't end up with any screaming from them. We also threw in the dried leeks before coagulating. It probably really does depend upon the quality of the dried mushrooms, I guess.

I read about the pressure cooking in a book on soy chemistry. It was a hot dog recipe. This was pressure cooked in a plastic hot dog casing. There was a picture of all these mock meats with a 1950's "better living through chemistry" type vibe to it. To me the idea held some promise for future experimenting.

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